On a recent afternoon at California State University Northridge, Nancy Prosenjak was attempting to quiet the graduate students spread out across conference tables in the back of her classroom. She was still missing nearly a third of the class, but she was eager to debrief with her students about their first day of student teaching.

“You’re still smiling, this is good!” she told her students as the chatter died down. A few stragglers trickled in, wearily making their way to their seats.

The 17 students had spent the morning in classrooms across North Los Angeles and would devote the rest of the afternoon to discussing their experiences in Prosenjak’s supervised fieldwork course, a class dedicated to student teaching. The class is a requirement in the university’s post-baccalaureate teacher preparation program.

“Who taught for one hour?” Prosenjak asked.

Nearly all the students raised their hand.

“Who was in charge for more than an hour?”

Five hands remained.

“How did that feel?” Prosenjak asked.

“It went quickly,” responded one student. “I liked it.”

For the rest of the semester, the students will gradually take over more responsibilities in local classrooms, many of which are in low-performing schools in high-poverty districts. Then, after a year of coursework, including an average of nearly 500 hours of practice in schools, most can seek out jobs running their own classrooms by this fall.

A high-quality teacher can make all the difference to a student who is struggling, according to a growing body of research that has found teachers are the largest in-school factor affecting student achievement. And there’s an emerging consensus that how teacher candidates are chosen and trained can make all the difference in developing teachers with the knowledge and skills to propel their students ahead.

But after students leave schools of education, and after years of reforms, the institutions often have no way of ascertaining if their programs produced strong teachers. In 1998, when 20 percent of the California’s fourth-graders tested at or above proficient in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, lawmakers in California passed ambitious legislation meant to strengthen teacher preparation programs. The legislation allowed for multiple routes to the classroom and introduced uniform design standards for those programs. It also created new tests to ensure aspiring teachers were ready for the classroom.

Schools of education adopted the reforms and adapted their programs beginning in 2002. In California, there are various routes to becoming a teacher, all of which require attaining a bachelor’s degree, passing several competency exams and spending time in a classroom.

Yet about 10 years after the reforms, there is little more than anecdotal evidence – and no hard data – to show whether teachers graduating from these programs are better than those who graduated before the reforms. Student test scores, which are increasingly used to assess teacher performance, have shown little improvement. By 2011, the number of California students proficient on the national reading exam had increased 5 percentage points, to 25 percent.

The need for quality teachers is especially urgent in California, where experts anticipate that thousands of teachers will retire in the next few years even as fewer people are attracted to the profession. (Between 2006 and 2011, enrollment in the state’s teacher training programs fell by 33 percent, most likely due to lack of job certainty, educators say.) The retirement figures ¬– combined with a large number of teachers currently teaching in subjects for which they are not certified and an ongoing shortage of teachers in areas like math, science and special education – have researchers estimating that California could lack nearly 33,000 teachers by 2015.

The declining number of students studying to become teachers has forced programs to try new recruiting tactics, including expanding to online programs that can draw students from rural areas or distant parts of the state. More new teachers also are earning their degree through district-run programs where education students start teaching in classrooms almost right away and take classes at a local university in the evening. But for aspiring teachers in California, enrolling in a traditional teacher preparation program through a private or public university is still the most popular route to the classroom.

Graduate students in the teacher preparation program at California State University, Northridge
discuss their student teaching assignments. Before they graduate, they will spend hundreds of hours in classrooms across the greater Los Angeles area. CREDIT: Jackie Mader / The Hechinger Report

Graduate students in the teacher preparation program at California State University, Northridge
discuss their student teaching assignments. Before they graduate, they will spend hundreds of hours in classrooms across the greater Los Angeles area. CREDIT: Jackie Mader / The Hechinger Report

At CSU Northridge, Michael Spagna, dean of the college of education, says the school of education underwent extensive changes after the reforms were passed in 1998. He says it was a “seismic shift” for California.

Many say the biggest change to teacher preparation was the introduction of a mandatory performance assessment, a multipart exam meant to assess how prepared teachers are for the classroom. The exam is required for certification and is taken at the end of the program or at certain points during the program, depending on the version of the test the training program uses. Schools of education created classes solely focused on preparing students to pass the exam, which centers on the “teaching event” where teacher candidates videotape a lesson and analyze it in a series of lengthy essays.

In education classrooms across California, the mention of the performance assessment elicits groans. “They think it’s this giant, big thing that they’re writing,” said Prosenjak of CSU Northridge. “Actually, it’s what teachers do every day,” she added. “But they just don’t write down 50 pages about it.”

Programs also were asked to make uncomfortable changes. After the passage of legislation in 1970, students could no longer become teachers after only completing an undergraduate program. Schools of education had to shrink what had been multiple-year courses of undergraduate study into a yearlong post-baccalaureate offering. And while aspiring teachers still could begin taking education courses in their undergraduate years, they now had to stay for a fifth year. When the 1998 reforms were passed, schools suddenly had to fit even more required coursework, such as health and technology education, into the year. The reforms brought a new emphasis on teaching English-language learners, which meant programs had to infuse strategies to reach these students throughout their courses.

“We were struggling,” said David Kretschmer, professor and chairman of the Department of Elementary Education at CSU Northridge. “It was a matter of squeezing other things out.”

The school discarded courses focusing on generic methods of teaching, instead offering methods courses specific to subject areas. Kretschmer said many courses improved, and the emphasis on English learners has mostly been seen as a success. But other courses didn’t drill down as deeply as they once did. “That was just an untenable position because we couldn’t do what we needed to do,” he said.

As schools of education tinkered with their courses and focused on preparing teachers for the new test, experts began to realize that there was no accountability system to make sure the reforms were working.

In 2006, Sharon E. Russell, a professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills, published one of several reports that highlighted the difficulties in tracking the impact of the teacher preparation reforms and argued for creating a system to connect teacher performance with student achievement as a way to see if they were working.

Officials at teacher preparation programs say they are eager for guidance, and they point to flaws in the state’s current accountability system for teaching programs, which looks at factors like admissions requirements and class offerings before approving programs. Julie Gainsburg, associate professor at CSU Northridge, was part of a research team that in 2009 attempted to study the classroom performance of recent graduates. The team found that it was hard to disaggregate the teacher preparation program’s impact from other factors, like a teacher’s own philosophies about teaching or professional development he or she received while teaching at the school.

“Unfortunately, we don’t know a lot about what happens to our graduates when they go out,” Gainsburg said.

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet affiliated with Teachers College, Columbia University, and distributed by California Watch, a media partner of U-T San Diego.